Nobel Winner Offers Free Online Climate Change Course

March 28, 2014

Some world renowned Penn State University scientists want to help more people understand climate change, so they're offering a free class, and anyone can take it from the comfort of their own home. This new type of course is known as a MOOC—a massive open online course.

Nobel Prize winner Dr. Richard Alley is the lead professor of the Penn State MOOC, “Energy, the Environment, and Our Future.” It’s made up of written information, quizzes and videos like this one, which is the last of the course. Standing in a snowy Pennsylvania forest, Alley sums up the 8-week-long class.

“If we release the CO2 from all our fossil fuels to the air—burn before we learn—we face a terrible energy crisis in a world that’s much harder to live in. If we use the scholarship, the knowledge of sustainable alternatives we face a world that can affordable power everyone, almost forever.”

This isn’t Penn State’s first MOOC or even its biggest, but around 35,000 people around the world signed up for the course. That’s almost as many as all the undergraduate students at Penn State University Park.

“I think it was close to 40,000 students started the MOOC. And a whole lot of them stayed with it. They’ve been commenting, interacting… Seth and I put together something that I think is working and that the students are really gaining from.”

Alley teamed up with fellow Penn State professor Seth Blumsack to teach the course.

“I would say this is unlike anything I have ever done before.”

Blumsack, like Alley, teaches in the college of Earth and Mineral Sciences. He covers the part of the course explaining renewable energy options available to replace non-renewables like oil, coal and gas. 

“These are everything from the first things people think of when you say ‘renewables’ like wind and solar and hydropower. To things that are more obscure and limited in use like geothermal, and some types of river power, and even large scale alteration of the climate.”

Each week there are one or two lessons, which Blumsack says they try to spice up with hands-on assignments.

“So technology in itself can get a bit dry. Here’s how a solar panel works, here’s how a wind turbine works. And so one of the things we were really trying to do, especially since we have a really truly global audience for this MOOC, was we were trying to get people who were really involved in the course to know what was going on other parts of the world, things they don’t normally see every day.  So we asked the students to go out and look around them in different parts of the world and to find examples of these alternative technologies actually being used. And so we had a lot of students actually reporting to us about things being used in their own backyards that people in other parts of the world might never see.”

Students post what they find in discussion forums. For this assignment, students from around the world wrote about nuclear energy in China, hydroelectric in the Dominican Republic, and solar in South Africa. But the class is clearly popular closer to home as well. Several threads discuss the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island 35 years ago.

Alley says his mother-in-law and Grandma Ellie are both taking the course and talk to him about it regularly. But a big limitation of MOOCs is professors can’t interact with every student one-on-one.

“What you get at a residential college, coming in here, living and meeting with your professors and fellow students, you can’t have on a MOOC. But not everyone can afford that residential college experience all the time. This is a way to reach the people who have a little time and want to engage. It’s a way to reach the people who want to engage, step back a little, and come back in. It’s a thing I think we’ll see integrated more into the total educational experience as we move to a world where school is not just four years at University Park, it’s your whole life.”

“While we definitely have very altruistic reasons for wanting to make these course available to people who may not be able to afford a Penn State quality education…we also knew those free MOOCs were going to be generating material and drawing interest to tuition-based programs that we offer through Penn State World Campus.”

Ann Taylor is the director of the Dutton E-Education Institute in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. The Institute oversees the college’s online courses. About a year into the experience, Taylor says it’s still unclear whether MOOCs will ever make money, but Penn State wanted to try them out. The university has been involved in distance learning since the days of the Pony Express.

“Back in the late 1800s that would be how you would get materials back and forth. It was independent learning. It was what we call correspondence study. So you would mail course materials to a student who might be out in the hinterlands somewhere. They’d work through materials. They’d read lecture materials, complete assignments, then put them back in the mail to their instructor. And the instructor would give them written feedback. It was like having a pen pal who was your professor.”

One of the biggest critiques of MOOCS is that, usually, less than 10 percent stick it out to the end. Taylor says that number doesn’t bother her.

"And I look at a topic like the climate change that’s being looked at in Richard Alley’s MOOC and I think, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re touching 4,000 people’s lives and those 4,000 people make a difference, and then they get 4,000 more people to make a difference and so on and so on.’ I mean, what an incredible impact that will have made.”

“And if the economy breaks down because of climate change? That’s my thought, but. Then you should have invested now. So I think a lot of people at least on this thread are in the alarmed category. Things are happening now. We can’t wait until later.”

Across town at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Centre County, a half dozen church members have gathered for a weekly group discussion of the Energy MOOC.

Dorothy Blair is an organizer of this discussion group and a member at the UUFCC. One core value of Unitarian Universalism is the interconnectedness of people and the environment. They’ve organized discussions about climate change at the church in the past. So when the MOOC came up Blair and others thought it would be a great basis for conversations. And hoped it would give participants the background knowledge they needed to make a difference.

“It helps people understand the technology behind climate change, the science behind climate change, so much better than they did that they feel empowered to do more and that they might be able to talk to other people about it. So that’s what we’re hoping, that it sort of spreads.”

Blair recently retired from Penn State, where she taught Food Security. She says she’s been teaching about climate change since 1980. But she’s learned new things in the course. And it gives her hope.

“It’s the first time when I’ve actually felt there’s enough initiative in this area, that we can really make something happen here.”